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After a five year self-imposed hiatus, the outspoken Christian metal band from San Diego is back at it with a new album out tomorrow titled Murdered Love.

In an interview with CBS Local, P.O.D. frontman, Sonny Sandoval, talks about breaking ground musically and jokes that the band has nothing to prove and would, even in jest, consider touring with an artist from a radically different genre.

Sandoval explains how P.O.D. developed their unique sound long before other comparable acts. “I don’t think it was like this decision, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this.’ Where we come from, in the South, we have a group of friends that are all reggae fanatics, and we have the b-boys and hip hop kids and long-haired metal heads. And because we were cool with everybody when we started jamming, it was nothing to put all those style together, plus it’s all we knew how to do. It’s not like we had this all planned out. We’d been doing it a while when we started to hear comparisons to Body Count and Rage Against the Machine.”

When asked if the new track titled “West Coast Rock Steady” had jazz influences, Sandoval laughs, “No man, you gotta understand, my guys, they’re all self-taught lovers of music and they continue to get better every day. They’re definitely influenced by jazz music, especially my cousin, the drummer. He plays it all. Growing up, it was like Metallica and Lee Ritenour. And, I was like, wow, that’s a weird combination. And then you have Trey, our bass player, who’s more into funk and R&B. This was why it was always so beautiful. There’s something about this passion for the style of music that we’re doing that brings us all together.

Presented with a potentially ridiculous pairing of P.O.D. playing backup on Katy Perry’s next tour, Sandoval chuckles, “Yeah, maybe… At this point if it pays right, shoot, hey we don’t have anything more to prove. I would go out on tour with someone like Katy Perry where before it was like, ‘That’s lame, you guys sold out. You’re supposed to be a metal band.’ Dude, we’ve done twenty years, we’ve got music that ranges from the heaviest to the softest. We’ve already paid our dues. It’s not like we couldn’t put together a killer set and open up for Katy Perry if the money was right.”

“Speaking of collaborations, we were hanging with Cypress Hill the other day and we were like, ‘Hey, why don’t we go on the road with you? Why don’t you guys go on a world tour and we’ll be the backing band so you don’t have to play to tracks. We’ll do some heavy stuff. And they were like, Hmmm.'”

P.O.D.’s eighth studio album titled Murdered Love will be available everywhere Tuesday, July 10th. Stream the entire album via AOL.